The Section 18A Receipt: What It Is, Who Needs One, and How to Not Get It Wrong

If your NPO relies on donations, you’ve probably heard donors ask for “an 18A certificate” without necessarily knowing what that means yourself. It’s worth understanding properly, because getting it wrong doesn’t just inconvenience your donor — it can put your organisation’s credibility, and their tax deduction, at risk.

What is Section 18A, in plain English?

Section 18A of the Income Tax Act allows a donor to deduct a bona fide donation from their taxable income — up to 10% of their taxable income per year — provided they hold a valid receipt from an organisation that SARS has specifically approved to issue them. It’s the mechanism that turns “thank you for your generosity” into “and here’s a tax benefit for it,” which is a genuinely powerful incentive for donor giving.

Here’s the catch: not every NPO or NPC can issue these receipts. Being registered as an NPO with the DSD, or even holding PBO status with SARS, doesn’t automatically give you the right to issue Section 18A receipts. That’s a separate approval, on top of PBO status, and your organisation needs to be conducting one of SARS’s recognised “public benefit activities” — welfare, healthcare, education, conservation, and land or housing development are the main categories that qualify.

What has to be on the receipt

SARS significantly tightened these requirements from 1 March 2026, and if your organisation hasn’t updated its receipt template since then, it’s worth checking now. A valid Section 18A receipt must include:

• Your organisation’s SARS reference number for Section 18A purposes
• Your organisation’s name and contact details
• The donor’s full details — including, now, whether they’re an individual, company, or trust, their ID or registration number, and their tax reference number
• The date and amount of the donation (or, for donations in kind, a description and fair market value)
• A unique receipt number
• Confirmation that the donation will be used exclusively for your approved public benefit activities

Missing any of this can mean the receipt is invalid — which means your donor’s deduction gets disallowed, and that’s not a conversation you want to have with a generous funder.

Doer vs conduit: a distinction worth knowing

If your organisation carries out the public benefit work itself, you’re a “doer.” If you instead pass donated funds on to other Section 18A-approved organisations to do the work, you’re a “conduit” — and conduits face extra rules, including a requirement to distribute at least half of receipted donations within 12 months of their financial year-end. Most grassroots NPOs are doers, but it’s worth knowing which one you are, especially if you ever partner with or fund another organisation.

Practical habits that keep you out of trouble

• Don’t issue a receipt before you’re approved. A receipt issued before SARS confirms your Section 18A reference number simply isn’t valid, no matter how well-intentioned the donation was.
• Keep a donation register, not just a spreadsheet of totals. You need to be able to match every receipt to a specific donor and donation, especially now that SARS requires more detailed reporting.
• Report to SARS, not just to your donors. Section 18A-approved organisations are required to submit regular data on the receipts they’ve issued, so SARS can cross-check what donors claim on their own tax returns.
• Ring-fence properly if you do mixed activities. If your organisation does both qualifying and non-qualifying public benefit work, you can only issue 18A receipts for donations used on the qualifying side — and you need records that clearly show which funds went where.

The bottom line

A Section 18A receipt is a small piece of paper carrying real legal weight — for your donor’s tax return and for your organisation’s credibility. Get the approval before you issue anything, keep the details complete and current, and treat your donation records as seriously as your bank statements. Your donors are trusting you with more than their money; they’re trusting you to get the paperwork right too.

Succession Planning: What Happens When Your Founder-Chair Burns Out?

Most grassroots NPOs are built around one or two extraordinary people who simply refused to let a problem in their community go unaddressed. That founding energy is a genuine gift. It’s also, quietly, one of the biggest risks the organisation carries — because what happens the day that founder needs to step back?

The plan most boards don’t have

Ask a typical volunteer board “what’s the succession plan if the chair has to step down tomorrow?” and you’ll usually get a long pause, followed by “we’ll figure it out.” That’s not a plan — it’s a hope. And hope is a poor substitute for a plan precisely when an organisation is under the most strain: right after losing the person who held it together.

Succession planning isn’t about assuming the worst of your founder, or rushing them out the door. It’s about protecting the organisation’s mission from being dependent on any single individual’s continued availability, health, and energy — because burnout, relocation, illness, and simple life changes happen to even the most committed people.

What good succession planning actually looks like

• Document what’s in your founder’s head. In most grassroots NPOs, an enormous amount of institutional knowledge — which supplier to call, how the informal beneficiary vetting process actually works, which funder needs a phone call versus an email — lives only in one person’s memory. Get it written down, even informally, before it’s urgently needed.
• Build a genuine deputy, not just a title. If your organisation has a vice-chair or deputy in name only, that role isn’t doing its job. A real deputy should be involved enough in decision-making and external relationships that they could step into the chair’s shoes with a few weeks’ notice, not a few years’.
• Stagger board terms. If every board member’s term happens to expire in the same year, you risk losing your entire institutional memory at once. Staggering terms — so only a portion of the board turns over each cycle — protects continuity even during a full changeover.
• Talk about burnout before it happens, not after. Founders and long-serving board members are often the last people to admit they’re running on empty, partly because the organisation feels inseparable from their own identity. A board that checks in honestly and regularly creates space for a founder to step back gracefully, rather than disappearing in a crisis.
• Separate the person from the role in your governance documents. If your MOI or constitution effectively only makes sense with a specific named individual in charge, that’s a structural risk. Governance documents should describe roles and processes that any capable person could step into, not describe your current chair’s personal way of doing things.

The uncomfortable conversation worth having

The hardest part of succession planning is usually emotional, not administrative: many founders genuinely fear that the organisation they built from nothing won’t survive without them, and sometimes that fear is well-founded, precisely because succession was never planned for. Naming this directly — “what does this organisation need to look like so it can outlive any one of us, including you?” — is one of the most valuable governance conversations a board can have, and it tends to be avoided for far too long.

The bottom line

A grassroots NPO’s greatest strength is often the passion of the person who started it. Its greatest vulnerability is usually the same thing, left unaddressed. Succession planning doesn’t diminish a founder’s legacy — done well, it’s how that legacy actually survives them.

Board vs Staff: Who’s Actually in Charge?

Here’s a scenario every grassroots NPO will recognise: the board chair also runs the feeding scheme on Tuesdays, the treasurer does the bookkeeping herself, and the “staff meeting” and the “board meeting” are, suspiciously, the exact same four people sitting around the exact same kitchen table. So who’s actually in charge?

The theory: governance vs management

In a textbook world, the board governs and the staff manages. The board sets strategy, approves budgets, oversees risk, and holds the organisation accountable to its funders and beneficiaries. Staff — paid or volunteer — execute the day-to-day work: running programmes, managing beneficiaries, paying the bills, answering emails. The board asks “are we doing the right things, and are we doing them properly?” Staff answer “here’s how it’s actually getting done.”

Where this breaks down is when the board starts directing operational detail (which staff member should handle a specific donor call) or when staff start making governance-level decisions (signing a major funding agreement without board approval). Both directions of overreach cause real damage — the first drains staff morale and slows everything down, the second exposes the organisation to decisions nobody with proper authority actually approved.

The nuance grassroots NPOs actually live with: the working board

Here’s the bit most governance guides skip over. In a well-resourced NPC, this board/staff line is clean because there are staff. In a grassroots NPO, the board members frequently are the staff — they’re the ones physically running the soup kitchen, managing the volunteers, or doing the bookkeeping, because there’s no budget to hire anyone else. This is called a working board, and it’s not a governance failure — it’s often the only way a small organisation gets anything done at all.

The trick with a working board isn’t to pretend the overlap doesn’t exist. It’s to be deliberate about which hat you’re wearing, and when:

• Separate the conversations, even if the people are the same. When the same four people meet to plan Tuesday’s feeding scheme logistics, that’s operational — no minutes required beyond a task list. When those same four people meet to approve the annual budget or a major donor agreement, that’s governance — it needs an agenda, minutes, and a resolution.
• No one signs off on their own work. If a working board member is also the person handling petty cash or approving their own reimbursements, you have a conflict of interest baked into the structure. Build in a second signature or a peer review, even if it feels like unnecessary admin for a five-person organisation.
• Recruit at least one or two non-working board members if you possibly can. Someone who isn’t in the operational trenches day-to-day brings a genuinely useful outside perspective, and can ask the “wait, why do we do it this way?” question that’s hard to ask about your own Tuesday routine.
• Review the split as you grow. A working board is often a phase, not a permanent structure. As an organisation gains funding and can hire staff, it’s healthy to deliberately transition board members out of operational roles and into pure oversight — even though that transition can feel uncomfortable for founders who built the thing with their own hands.

Why the distinction still matters, even when it’s blurry

Funders, auditors, and SARS don’t care that your board is small and stretched thin — they still want to see evidence that decisions were made by the right people, in the right capacity, with the right paper trail. A working board that’s clear about which hat it’s wearing at any given moment can absolutely satisfy this. A working board that’s never thought about the distinction at all is a governance risk waiting to surface at the worst possible time — usually during a funder audit or a dispute between members.

The bottom line

Board governs, staff manages — and in a grassroots NPO, those might be the same four exhausted people. That’s fine, as long as everyone’s clear about which conversation they’re having and when. Wear the governance hat deliberately, minute the decisions that need minuting, and don’t let anyone mark their own homework.